My Arbeitszimmer is but a quarter the size of Gerhard Domagk's in Elberfeld. It looks not upon the Schwebebahn but on British Rail. I stare down on the lines winding away from Euston Station, behind the backs of crumbly houses whose tiles were shivered by Hitler's Luftwaffe and the Kaiser's Zeppelins. I have no Otto Dix on the wall-though our country home sports a couple of Bratbys, who resembles Dix with a splash of Cockney cheerfulness. But I have the same framed photographs of fellow scientists. One is of Domagk himself, a few strands of hair brushed across the dome of his head, in plastic-rimmed glasses and the sleeves of his white lab coat still too long for him. He is working at his microscope in the room where I met the girl with the Slav eyes. It is scrawled upon barely legibly, _freundliche Grьsse Gerhard Domagk 24.12.63._ A year later he died, aged sixty-eight, at No 11 Jдgerstrasse, round the corner from his old home in Walkьrenallee near the Zoo. It was an infected gallbladder. 'The germs got their revenge,' people in Wuppertal said gloomily.
The photograph next to Domagk's is inscribed _To Jim Elgar. Good luck! Alexander Fleming._ Flem is silver haired and unaccountably wistful, with rimless glasses and a spotted bow tie and a herpes lesion on his lower lip. It is a studio study from the time of his second marriage in 1953 to his bacteriological assistant from Greece, Dr Amalia Koutsouris-Voureka-who to my mind achieved even mightier distinction by being the first woman allowed by Sir Almroth Wright to work in his Department. Fleming's photograph is dated November 11, 1954, precisely a year and four months before he died from a coronary thrombosis in bed. He lies in the crypt of St Paul's, with Wellington and Nelson.
My third photograph is from the bacteriologist Leonard Colebrook _(For Professor John Elgar, Regards, Coli)._ A kind scholarly face, a long mouth with a deep upper lip and protruding lower one, beetling brows and beaky nose under heavily-rimmed glasses. He died on September 29, 1967-another coronary. The remaining one was given me by Jack Drummond, one of the editors of the journal which contained Fleming's paper. He signed it when he was knighted in 1944. He was murdered after the war by a French farmer. After such a gallery of fatalities, my wife has strictly forbidden me to sign anything for presentation to anyone.
Hargraves would certainly frame my own photograph and hang it on the wall if he thought it would reliably speed my demise. Hargraves is a coming man, and most impatient about it. I do not like Hargraves. Not that he is in the slightest unpleasant. On the contrary, he is always smiling, encouraging our juniors, joking with our students and shaking hands warmly with our visitors. He is an outstanding chemist and exceptional organizer. He has stylish hair, a fancy moustache, glistening teeth, square glasses, and his clothes always look new. At home, he has a pink plastic swimming pool and a talkative wife. He goes for holidays on baked, insanitary beaches in Spain and discusses television. I suspect that he eats breakfast cereals and drinks vodka and even applies after-shave lotion.
Hargraves had wedged his way between my filing cabinets and my desk, ostensibly to chat about my research. Nobody at Arundel knows exactly what research I am doing. I am remote in my own small laboratory, like the ageing Sir Almroth Wright, who would arrive at St Mary's after lunch and potter scientifically until released by dinner. Suddenly Hargraves threw in a confession. 'I was at the College Council meeting yesterday-they were sorry again you couldn't make it-when the pleasant suggestion cropped up that you might be allowed to round off your time here with a sabbatical year.'
He meant that he had urged them to push me out early. 'What should I do all day?'
'Travel?'
'Oh, God!'
'Well, we all know how you love your farm, Jim.'
Why must everyone use Christian names? Hardly through friendship in this age of intense mutual suspicion. To insist that we are all equal? Supposing I had called my mentor 'Almroth'?
'My wife runs the farm. If I were there all week I'd only get in the way.'
'You're being modest, Jim. She told me you were invaluable with the livestock.'
'No, I prefer to stay here to the bitter end. It's disheartening, slogging your way through a marathon and giving up at the last lap.'
'Personally, of course, I'm delighted that you're prepared to carry responsibility for the department a little longer.'
'I'm sure you are.'
Hargraves left. He will try again at the next Council meeting, unless I mischievously swallow my boredom and attend.
The summer of 1934 saw an improvement in my condition. I escaped from the basement and I found a job. For both I was indebted to Archie Fry.
I left home in the middle of July. Perhaps my parents were secretly glad to shed the puppy they had become over-fond of, which turned into a dog they had no idea what to do with. Rosie turned pale. Sir Edward had sailed to America, but Lady Tip summoned me up to the drawing-room.
'I thought you might have asked to see me of your own accord, Jim.'
Elizabeth sat on the sofa beside her, just released from boarding school, bewitching in soft summer dress of cream silk. She sat looking at me wide-eyed, as though I were some queer fish dredged from the depths for her biological inspection.
'I didn't imagine that you would be particularly distressed if I failed to say good-bye, your Ladyship.' I did not know in my own mind if I were being rude or apologetic.
'I am distressed. Not because you didn't _faire vos adieux,_ that's a matter of indifference. But you are leaving my house after _eight years_ without so much as coming to thank me for sheltering you, for feeding you and for doing absolutely everything for you during that time. You went to Germany and came back again without so much as a murmur of thanks, or even asking my leave. That's exactly the same with everyone of your class. Rank ingratitude, all take and no give.'
'My parents may be your Ladyship's servants, but I'm not,' I said more boldly.
'As far as I'm concerned, I can see no distinction.'
'I can't understand that attitude. But of course, I'm so much better educated than you are.'
'How dare you! Remember your position.'
Whether through embarrassment, or fright, or simply from seeing the fun of the situation, her daughter broke the tension by giggling.
'Shut up,' snapped Lady Tip at her. But without avail. _'Shut up!_ Oh, get out, you little swine,' she dismissed me.
Archie Fry's flat was the first floor of an enormous house at the corner of Belgrave Square, gloomy and rambling, full of heavy furniture and bad paintings in expensive frames, everywhere terribly dusty. David and I shared a huge room at the back, and looked after ourselves. Archie was out all day and often most of the night, running hostels for down-and-outs in the East End, or reforming the world with the Fabian Society, or nursing a north London constituency which he hoped to win as Labour candidate in the next election. (He failed.)
Shortly after my arrival, we all three contrived to dine together in the vast green and gold dining-room. Archie was eager for my impressions of Germany.
'Surely you can't condemn these labour service camps out of hand,' Archie objected. 'The young Germans may make themselves look ridiculous by shouldering arms with shovels, but there's plenty of men in this country who'd jump at the chance of doing the same for three square meals a day.'
'That's not the point. The Nazis turn even the digging of ditches into a military exercise for the glory of the Fatherland.'
'How can we blame them? The Treaty of Versailles was perfectly wicked. We couldn't expect any self-respecting nation to lie down under it. After fifteen years it seems high time to admit that, and admit Herr Hitler's right to demand parity of armaments with us and the French. In the meantime, digging ditches seems a preferable occupation for young men in uniform than digging graves.'
'But don't you understand? The Nazis don't see war as we do, something to be avoided at all costs. They see war as necessary and desirable, the great national purifier.'
'The Hegelian view,' commented Archie. 'The moral health of nations is corrupted by unbroken peace, as tern-pests preserv
e the sea from the foulness brought by prolonged calm." Of course, a lot of German philosophy is sheer lunacy. I suppose because they're not blessed with authors like Lewis Carroll and W S Gilbert, who can write lunacy properly.'
He struggled to cut his leg of chicken. Archie was tall and spare, with a sharp nose and bony face, his eyes soft and brown, his hair dark and lank. He wore a suit of Donegal tweed with a red knitted tie in a loose collar, an outfit which other young men of his background would have thought more suitable for the butts than Belgravia.
'This chicken,' complained David Mellors across the oval mahogany table. 'I don't know what disease it succumbed to, but it's got a bad case of rigor mortis.'
'Watson, can't you do better than this?' demanded Archie of his manservant, who appeared with a dish of greyish boiled potatoes. The Jeeves was knobbly-faced, bald, tubby and flat footed. Archie proudly claimed the man never needed call him 'Sir'. The effect was his being uninterruptedly rude to all three of us.
'What's wrong with it?' Watson asked.
'We can't cut it, let alone eat it.'
David poured himself another glass of the chateau bottled claret. The food at Archie's was terrible, the drink superb and plentiful, and he never seemed to worry at our helping ourselves.
'You can't expect me to work miracles,' Watson replied surlily. 'If you wants proper vittles, you'll have to get a proper cook.'
'I'm sorry cooking is too much for you, Watson,' Archie told him apologetically. 'I'd engage a cook tomorrow, but you know how I disapprove of a house full of servants.'
'Then you'd better go out to Lyons Corner House. I can't do everything. Keeping this place clean is like dusting the bloody British Museum.'
'Of course, Watson, I appreciate all you do to make us comfortable.'
'If you don't want your chicken, I'll clear it away,' Watson said aggressively.
No, no, Watson, we'll try.'
'I've got some bicarbonate outside, and there's a stomach pump at Mary's,' said David.
'Watson really is a little difficult,' Archie murmured as he left. 'But if I didn't employ him, nobody else would. I just can't agree with you, Jim,' he resumed. 'I cannot take the Nazis seriously.'
'You haven't seen them at close quarters. I've been interrogated by them. That was quite frightening.'
'Yes, but Germans tend to browbeat people as a matter of course. It's part of the national character.'
'That's the very secret of Nazism. They exaggerate and twist every thought inside a German head. What once passed as normal now becomes dangerous and grotesque. Love of country, respect for discipline, pride in race…even uniforms and torchlight parades and camp fires, perfectly harmless in themselves, are these days exploited to the single end of the glorification of Adolf Hitler.'
'The Germans are perhaps a _krankes Volk,_ a sick people,' Archie reflected. 'But I'm perfectly certain that Hitler is simply whipping up excitement for excitement's sake, like a speedway rider or circus performer. To keep his people's minds off the economic situation.'
'You mean, Hitler's just the Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze?'
'Roughly, yes.'
'Oh, God. You blind fool.' I pushed away the chicken. I wasn't hungry any more, anyway. I had come back from Germany full of the dangers of Hitler and the blessings of sulphonamide. Nobody would believe me about either. I began to suspect I was in the wrong.
The following week, Archie found me my job. His father was the creator of Fry's Carbolic Soap, and a thousand other items by which the British masses removed their natural odours and substituted others. He was also a governor of the Arundel College which employs me to this day, which is akin to the Imperial College of Science in Kensington. In his secretively generous way, Archie got his father to grant a few hundred pounds for research into the disinfectant properties of various medicated soaps, and there was no difficulty in my being appointed its beneficiary.
Research in those days carried no glamorous suggestion of white-coated armies steadily advancing the frontiers of knowledge. It did not exist outside the few universities and exceptional departments like Sir Almroth Wright's. A busy Harley Street specialist might cut up a cat as spare-time relaxation, comparable with salmon fishing or hospital politics. If you needed research apparatus more elaborate than a Bunsen burner or a retort you constructed it yourself. There was nobody to manufacture it. There was anyway no money to buy it. I started that summer to examine the potency of antiseptics like carbolic, chlorine, formaldehyde or iodine against common household germs. In the end, I found plain soap to be more effective than any of them, I hope to the gratification of my sponsor.
But first I had to supply myself with germs, for which I turned to an acquaintance of my days in St Mary's, Dr Leonard Colebrook.
'Coli'-everyone called Colebrook by his bacteriological nickname from _Bacillus coli,_ even himself-was reared a strict Nonconformist, frugal, teetotal, his interests only gardening and euthanasia. Like me, he was a grammar school boy. He was due to leave the Inoculation Department the year after I quit it for Cambridge, and again like me found himself without hope of a job. Coli was grateful for a salary of Ј100 a year to work in the research laboratory of Queen Charlotte's Maternity Hospital, which midwives know the world over. He was still there, and the hospital was just down the way from Arundel College in the Marylebone Road.
Coli often bustled into Arundel from his little open Morris Oxford, with a bag which seemed more suited for the necessities of a leisured weekend than a day's work, which he would drop while simultaneously whipping off his Homburg hat and struggling from an enormous, enveloping raincoat, in another moment deep in discussion with some member of the staff more elevated than myself. I had started at Arundel promptly at the beginning of August, and during my second week intercepted him in the marble-lined hall.
'Why, it's Elgar. What have you been doing with yourself?' he asked amiably. He was slightly built and barely five feet tall, just turned fifty. 'The last I heard, you'd got a First at Cambridge and were doing some work on staining techniques with Hopkins. Well done.'
I told him about Wuppertal. He remarked, 'How's your German?'
'It's improved, _das versteht sich.'_
'German is essential for keeping up to date in any of the sciences.' Coli matched a deep voice with a deliberate, solemn way of saying things. 'You'll remember, I took myself off to Breslau while you were working under The Lion.' He used the more flattering soubriquet for Sir Almroth Wright. The pair were so close they were often compared in the department with father and son.
He mentioned Fleming and his mould juice. 'It was your fault, wasn't it, that the penicillium ever contaminated his Petri dish? Did you know that Professor Raistrick tried to purify the stuff, down the road from here at the London School of Tropical Medicine?' I had never heard of anyone interested in penicillin outside St Mary's. 'That must have been in 1929, or thereabouts. Flem sent him a sample from that original spore-Raistrick knows absolutely everything about moulds, of course. He tried growing it on a special glucose solution. It produced a sort of mat on the surface, but the potency's all in the juice underneath.'
My chemist's curiosity aroused, I asked, 'I suppose Raistrick never isolated the active principle?'
'He hadn't much luck. He ended up with a yellow pigment which he called "chrysogenin", and he tried extracting penicillin from it with ether. But unfortunately the penicillin simply disappeared into thin air. And you can't identify a chemical if it's too unstable to stay under your nose for more than half a minute.'
'No, of course not.'
'After that, I fancy Raistrick rather lost interest. They had other bad luck. One of his staff working on the mould juice was killed in a road accident, another died. They wrote an inconclusive paper about it in the _Biochemical Journal _towards the end of 1932, if you're interested.'
Coli agreed to supply me with a mixed bag of germs from his own laboratory. The month of August passed. A peace came to me which I had not enjoyed since
Cambridge. I was doing useful work, I was my own master, reasonably well paid, well housed among friends. I was out of that damned basement. I had put off calling upon my parents because Sir Edward was still abroad and I did not wish to encounter Lady Tip. Above all, I wanted to shed Rosie.
The first of September was a Saturday. About five in the afternoon I was sitting with David in Archie's flat when the doorbell rang. The surly Watson being off, David answered it. He returned after some time. 'It's your girl friend, Rosie.'
'I don't want to see her. Say I'm not in.'
'I know you don't. I tried putting her off, but it wouldn't wash.'
'Oh, God. Must I really talk to her? It's like entertaining a ghost. All that's behind me now.'
'I think you ought to have a word with her, boy,' advised David, with an unaccustomed solemnity which alarmed me.
17
I did not ask Rosie into the flat. I took her to a nearby Lyons teashop by St George's Hospital at Hyde Park Corner. She was crying most of the way. I did not want to talk about it until we were sitting down. It would give me time to collect my thoughts. I bought her a cup of tea and a shiny bun with lumps of sugar like broken glass on top. She never touched either, but went on crying.
'Why didn't you tell me before?' I demanded.
'I couldn't…I couldn't be sure.'
'But you are sure? Are you?'
She nodded dumbly, the cheap pink handkerchief at her eyes thoroughly wet through.
'How long has it been going on?'
'I haven't had my monthlies since last June.'
'But how can you be sure. There might be other reasons.'
'I can see it.'
'I can't.'
'When I has my wash. I can see it, plain as anything. Soon everyone will be able to.'
'You're sure it's me?'
For a moment she did not comprehend, then she exclaimed, 'How can you say that?' starting to cry again, making me feel doubly guilty, ashamed, frightened, desperate and confused.
THE INVISIBLE VICTORY Page 13
